In the wild, animals find their own food and often need to do some tasks with the food they found before eating. Wild animals thus have some challenges that they need to overcome before eating some food. Most domesticated animals, however, have no significant challenge to overcome before eating since they are generally fed by humans. Food presented to them is often preprocessed and often needs no intervention from the animal before eating. Nevertheless, domesticated animals still have different basic food-related instincts that were essential to the survivals of their ancestors in the wild. These basic food-related instincts are often never entirely suppressed. They can result in some behaviors that are generally undesirable for most owners or caretakers of domesticated animals, depending on the kind of animal and where the animal lives. For example, in the case of pets such as cats or dogs, these behaviors can include damaging furniture or personal objects while simulating hunting or food processing. They can even include chasing or hunting smaller backyard animals. People are thus constantly looking for suitable stimulating challenge's that can mitigate some of the basic food-related instincts of domesticated animals.
Furthermore, some domesticated animals have a tendency of eating food too quickly when the food is just simply presented to them, for instance using a classic animal food bowl or the like. Eating food too quickly can have undesirable consequences for the animal, such as digestive problems, vomiting, gases, etc. An abnormally-fast eating can also cause some animals to eat more food than they actually need before reaching the point of satiety. These animals can become overweight after a given time and develop related health problems. For some other domesticated animals, the absence of a stimulating challenge at the time of their meal makes them to eat less food than their body actually needs. Eating less food than required can also cause health problems over time.
Many arrangements that can provide a measured quantity of food to domesticated animals have been proposed over the years. Some were aimed at automatically providing food at predetermined time intervals, for instance once each day, during the absence of their owners or caretakers. Examples of such arrangements are presented in U.S. Pat. No. 4,450,790 granted on 29 May 1984, French Patent Application No. 2 574 622 published on 20 Jun. 1986, U.S. Design Pat. No. 335,370 granted on 4 May 1993, U.S. Design Pat. No. 339,429 granted on 14 Sep. 1993, and European Patent No. 0 505 049 B1 granted on 11 Jan. 1995. Other arrangements include some form of actuation by the animals. Examples of such arrangements are presented in U.S. Pat. No. 3,204,608 granted on 7 Sep. 1965, U.S. Pat. No. 4,823,738 granted on 25 Apr. 1989, U.S. Pat. No. 5,150,664 granted on 29 Sep. 1992, PCT Publication NO WO 97/05770 published on 20 Feb. 1997, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,111,581 granted on 26 Sep. 2006. However, the relative complexity of these various arrangements often creates many difficulties in terms of manufacturability, dependability and overall costs of the final products.
Arrangements designed to slow down the ingestion of food by animals have also been presented in the past. One example if U.K. Patent No. 423,080 granted 24 Jan. 1935. Such arrangement included a concave plate having holes or large perforations therein and provided with a rail or rim. The plate is placed over the animal's food in a container and rests on the food. The food comes up through the holes or perforations or over the edge of the plate. This arrangement prevents the animal from bolting its food.
PCT Publication No. WO 2009/078788 published on 25 Jun. 2009 discloses a pet game board and board game. This arrangement, however, is designed to provide rewards to pets in the form of treats. It is not designed to provide a complete meal to the animals.
None of the arrangements suggested in the past was found to be completely satisfactory for providing a stimulating challenge to domesticated animals when they eat their meal. Clearly, room for improvements still exists in the area.